Bond 007 Melbourne Exhibition 2013

To paraphrase Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen) in Goldeneye, "This time, Mr Bond, the pleasure will be all ours".

Designing 007 – Fifty Years of Bond, a touring exhibition dedicated to the world's most famous licensed killer, will open at Melbourne Museum on November 1 and run until February 23, 2014.

Melbourne will be the only city in Australia and New Zealand to host the exhibition, which was created for the Barbican Centre in London and opens in Shanghai next month following a Toronto season that coincided with that city's internationally renowned film festival.

"This exhibition allows a timely appraisal of the distinctive design, craftsmanship and style of the Bond movies," said Museum Victoria CEO Dr Patrick Greene at the press launch of the exhibition on Wednesday. "After all, so many aspects of Bond are timeless."

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The exhibition features images, props, costumes and design sketches and, of course, hi-tech gadgets from all 23 of the official James Bond films, a series that kicked off in 1962 with Sean Connery playing the British secret agent in Dr No. The exhibition was suggested and is supported by Eon Productions, the company founded in 1961 by the late Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry Saltzman and now run by Broccoli's daughter Barbara and stepson Michael G. Wilson.

"They decided 50 years must not go by without being marked, and they approached the Barbican, and said 'We've got this fantastic archive'," Dr Greene said. "That's another wonderful coincidence, I suppose, or chance, that makes this exhibition possible – that the company has actually collected things, because not many film companies do that."

In its 50th and 51st years, the Eon series has enjoyed unprecedented success, with Skyfall having taken more than $US1.1 billion at the global box office to date. That is almost twice the tally of the second-most successful Bond film (not adjusted for inflation), 2005's Casino Royale, the first outing of Daniel Craig as the sixth "official" James Bond.

The two non-Eon Bond films – the 1967 spoof Casino Royale (which starred David Niven and Peter Sellers among its seven Bonds) and 1983's Never Say Never Again (in which Sean Connery reprised the role he had 12 years earlier vowed to play "never again") – do not feature. Also absent is Bond's first filmed outing, in a 1954 American TV adaptation in which he was played by Barry Nelson.

The exhibition includes a replica of the room in which Ian Fleming wrote the novels, the first of which was published in 1953, as well as the room in which M first grants Bond his licence to kill. Naturally, there's also Q's laboratory, complete with such gadgetry as the attache case featured in From Russia With Love. The Aston Martin DB5, which first appeared in Goldfinger (1964) and resurfaced spectacularly in Skyfall, also features.

Designing 007 is supported by the state government-backed Victorian Major Events Company, and is a key plank in Victoria's bid to fight off the inroads made by NSW and Queensland into the lucrative event tourism market in recent years.

"We are thrilled to be welcoming James Bond, one of the world's most stylish men, to one of the world's most stylish cities," said state Tourism and Major Events Minister Louise Asher.

Noting that the Bond exhibition will coincide with the Spring Racing Carnival, the Boxing Day Ashes Test at the MCG and the Australian Open tennis, and that the sector was worth $1.4 billion annually to the Victorian economy. Ms Asher added: "We in Melbourne have perfected major events."

World domination – "the same old dream" – as Bond put it in Dr No, is surely just around the corner.